Confronting the reality of paradox in sustainable tourism

ByMICHAEL HUGHES, CHRISTOF PFORR

Sustainable Tourism is a ubiquitous term that has accumulated considerable
attention and controversy from researchers, policy makers and practitioners. The
concept of sustainable tourism emerged in the late 1980s through the assimilation of the sustainable development and tourism development paradigms in the
wake of the seminal Brundtland Report (Welford et al. 1999). A growing mainstream awareness of human influences on ecological processes and a realisation
that functioning natural systems are needed to support human life contributed to
the perceived need for sustainable development. How this awareness and
concern should be applied in practice has been a subject of often heated and ongoing local, national and global debate. Not surprisingly, the adoption of sustainable development ideology into the field of tourism also stimulated a multitude
of conflicting ideas and perspectives (Hunter 2002).
The idea that human activity can impact on the natural systems and subsequently threaten human prosperity, and even survival, has a long scholarly
history. For example, Hans Carl von Carlowitz (1713) wrote about sustainable
forestry practices in Germany as a means for continuation of the resource and
the survival of local communities. Carlowitz was in turn drawing on the principles of silviculture dating from the sixteenth century (Hasel and Schwartz
2006; Müller 1992). Modern recognition of a need for sustainable living, though
without explicitly using this rhetorical frame of reference, gained prominence in
mainstream thinking during the 1960s and 1970s. This growing popular awareness was exemplified by publications such as Carson’s (1963) Silent Spring and
Erhlich and Erhlich’s (1968) The Population Bomb, both which became best
sellers. The Erhlichs’ book was derivative of arguments made almost two centuries earlier by Malthus (1798) on the limited capacity of society to feed a continually growing population. The Erhlichs and Malthus were writing in historical
periods of significant social and political change, and Malthus’ work was
ground-breaking for his time. However, The Population Bomb had the advantage
of international mass print production, international mass media and a generally
higher level of education amongst the wider population, arguably making the
Erhlichs’ book more readily accessible. The general rediscovery of a need for
sustainable development coincided with social and political pressure to take
action, especially in the face of high profile environmental disasters publicised

by that same international mass media. Infamous environmental ‘firsts’ of that
era included the grounding of the oil tanker Torrey Canyon off the UK in 1967,
the Three Mile Island partial nuclear meltdown in 1979 and the Union Carbide
chemical disaster in Bhopal, India, in 1984.
Institutional recognition of a need for sustainable development manifested in
reports such as The Limit to Growth, released by the Club of Rome in 1972. This
landmark report recognised that natural resources are limited and overexploitation could have very serious consequences for human society (Meadows et al.
1972). In 1983, the United Nations convened the World Commission on
Environment and Development to consider the issues associated with long term
economic and social development and its relationship with natural resources. A
subsequent report set out to define the parameters of sustainable development
(Brundtland 1987), fuelling a considerable amount of debate. Subsequent United
Nations sponsored conferences on environment and development through the
1990s and 2000s have attempted, with limited success, to clarify and obtain
agreement on how sustainable development translates into policy and practice.
The on-going debate about the meaning and application of sustainable development is a product of both ideology and practicality, that is, where the emphasis
should be placed with regard to economic, social and environmental imperatives
(Hunter 2002).